I miss her...

I recently wrote a narrative piece for a writing class. The subject was personal adversity/hardship. This is my story. 

An angel in the book of life wrote down my baby's birth.

Then whispered as she closed the book “Too beautiful for earth.”

~Unknown

Late evening, March 29, 2000

It’s mid-morning on Friday, April 7, 2000. I’m only a few months past my twentieth birthday and nine days ago I gave birth to the most beautiful miniature human I’ve ever laid eyes on—Shamilee Tenesa Olson. She has no real hair to speak of aside from that dusting of newborn peach fuzz so common for babies born into my family, but I can easily picture her running around a few years from now with bright green eyes full of love, beautiful blonde curls and a giggle that will radiate pure joy. I should be giddy with happiness at the prospect of waking up and seeing her beautiful smiling face every morning for the next eighteen or so years. Right now, thinking back on the last several days, I’m completely terrified at the thought of those curls never being anything more than a picture in my mind.

When we got her home from the hospital last Thursday, everything seemed perfect. My parents had come up a few days early to be with us for the birth, and my mother had stayed to help my husband, Brandon, and me adjust to parenthood. Dad had left Friday morning to make the four-hour return to trip Utah Valley for business. The weekend had been stressful. At some point on Saturday, Shami started to struggle with latching on at feeding time. She seemed to be less and less interested in eating at all.

We had increased feedings to every hour or so and had been working diligently, trying different techniques and positions, hoping to find one that would be comfortable for me and make eating easier for the baby. My angel of a mother was so incredibly patient and kind as she did what she could to help, including waking me and the baby several times during the night, so I could try to nurse. We were all tired, and I was frustrated; I felt like it was my fault the baby wasn’t doing well. I wanted to take a shower before we tried again. Shamilee was sleeping peacefully when I laid her down and left the room. I can still remember the sound of her tiny little baby breaths and feel the soft warm puffs of air on my neck as she breathed in and out. It was Mom who found her in the bassinette next to my bed a short while later, her perfect tiny face blue from lack of breath. We rushed her to the hospital not waiting for an ambulance. That was Monday afternoon.

Mom had called Dad to tell him what happened, and he was back in Rexburg before we got home from the hospital that night. Tuesday morning, they told us she was doing better, but they wanted to keep her another night to be sure everything was ok. When Brandon answered the phone Wednesday morning I could tell by the look on his face it wasn’t good news. We made our way to the hospital and I was able to touch my daughter’s tiny face for the first time in two days. I wanted so badly to take her in my arms and just hold her and hug her and tell her everything was going to be ok, but there were tubes and wires everywhere. With tears of helplessness in her eyes, the nurse told me I couldn’t hold my baby girl. I started to cry. 

Brandon and I were shuffled out of the nursery into a room where a doctor explained that Shami had not continued to improve as they had hoped, and things were much worse than they initially thought. They didn’t have a clear diagnosis, but they knew that her kidneys were failing, and they didn’t have the equipment, or the expertise needed to care for her or make an accurate diagnosis. The nearest possible chance of hope for her was 240 miles away at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. Life Flight had been alerted, and they were prepared for immediate transport. There was an ambulance waiting to take her to the small regional airport where she would depart for Salt Lake City. There was only room for one of us on the plane and we only had a few minutes to decide who. My immediate thought was Brandon should go. I could still barely walk from the after effects of a natural delivery and if this was it, he needed that time with her. She’d been with me nearly every second for the last ten months. I didn’t want him to miss a single moment of whatever time was left. Once on the plane, the crew nearly lost her twice in flight. After the second time, it was decided that she would not survive the twelve-mile trip from the SLC airport to the hospital by ground, so the helicopter was waiting for them at the airport.

We’ve been in Salt Lake City for two days now. The door of the family suite we’ve been sleeping in the last two nights is open, and I can see the doctor walking toward us. For most everyone else in the Salt Lake Valley, today is a beautiful and cloudless spring day. But dark and heavy shadows are closing on my heart and I’m powerless to stop them. The weight of their miserable nothingness is crushing me from all sides and there is no escape. The paltry flame of hope that had been trembling with faint but willful determination a few moments ago has just been extinguished by the look on his face. I’ve always hated hospitals.

At the sight of his face, my breathing is suddenly difficult and slow. The air around me is thick with hopelessness and the breathing of it chokes me. Try as I might, I cannot make myself stop from taking another and another and another. My conscious mind knows there is no reason to keep breathing and yet my lungs continue their now torturous task, oblivious to the reality they need no longer function.

I’m cold—not just chilly, but that bone deep kind of cold from which there is no retreat and no relief. I honestly believe I will never again feel warmth of any kind. Everything and everyone, including myself, seems to hang in silhouette just outside my reach on the other side of this icy fog of darkness in which I now exist. I know I’m in a room with at least a dozen other people. Brandon. My parents. A few of my sisters. My cousin Xenya. Her husband David? There are others but I can’t focus enough to make sense of their faces.  I think someone is touching me—hugging me, maybe? I can feel nothing but pain in every part of my body, and yet I am numb from head to toe.

The tears begin to fall as he walks in the room—or maybe they hadn’t ever really stopped since Rexburg? They slice down my cheeks like razor blades. I know by the look on his face that no good can come of what he has to say. I’m terrified to hear the words and I silently beg him not to speak. If he doesn’t say the words, then it won’t be real, and if it’s not real then we can all get in the car and go home, and it will all have just been a bad dream—but only if he doesn’t say the words. I continue my silent begging, a futile effort to stop time.

He comes in the room, holding me hostage with the look on his face, and he gently lays the verbal grenade in my hands, knowing I don’t have the strength to hold the lever down once his words pull the pin: “I’m sorry; we’ve done all we can. It’s time to let go.” Completely horrified, I witness the explosion of my heart from somewhere outside myself. The sharp and jagged edges of each shattered piece rip a hole through me, shredding my every hope and dream into tiny bits of nothingness that settle on the floor like dust to be carelessly swept away later by someone with a broom and no care or concern for what those bits of dust used to be.

Distantly, I wondered how many times this act of destruction has happened in this room. How many times has he been the one to detonate that emotional explosive from which one can never truly recover?

I search the room for some sort of diversion. Anything that might provide even a glimmer of distraction. Everything around me feels distorted. The people around me are moving so slowly. It looks like they’re all crying, too, but I can’t hear anything. I search in my mind for the sweet, peaceful sound and the soft breeze of my daughter’s breath, but all I find is a deafening silence echoing in the hole where my heart used to be. The fog is getting heavier and the shadows press tighter and tighter. My ears are ringing now. The buzzing of florescent lights somewhere above my head is somehow louder than the deafening silence from a moment ago. The wispy echoes of tears and sniffling around me begin to appear like silent raindrops on a dark window, running lost and directionless in the deep, all-consuming blackness of a night with no moon.

There’s so much dust on the floor. So many lost bits of life left by all the others who heard those same words of desolation in this room. My entire body is trembling. My mind is numb. My body is frozen. I want to run, but I can’t move. I want to scream, but the sound is swallowed by the emptiness.

And then I see it. A spot on the tile floor near the toe of his left shoe. One corner of the tile he is standing on is broken.  There’s a piece missing—swept away at some point, probably years ago. The sharp edges where the tile broke off look like they’ve smoothed out over time, but no one had repaired the hole left behind. The floor has clearly been cleaned and probably resealed several times in what has probably been decades since the loss of that one piece. The sheen of the lacquer finish is visible in the remaining depression. I wonder how long it has been there—the hole, not the tile. Had I noticed it before? Why can’t I remember seeing it before now? His shoes are brown. Why are his shoes brown? He’s a doctor, shouldn’t they be a color other than brown? Why didn’t anyone fix the hole? Why didn’t anyone care that there was a gaping hole? What am I supposed to do with the hole?

“You’re welcome to hold her if you’d like. That’s helpful for some parents.” The words enter my ears with glaring clarity. Hold her? Before she was born, I had dreamed so many times of sitting up late nights in the rocking chair, snuggling her close to me and singing to her softly, moonlight filtering in through the window. In those dreams, I had been able to feel her breath on my neck as I rocked her back and forth as she slept. That feeling would be all the comfort I would need in life; so tiny, so perfect, so peaceful—and now, so gone. I cannot imagine there is comfort or consolation that could heal the pain I feel right here, right now.

Shamilee Tenesa Olson
March 29, 2000 - April 7, 2000 

I never did hold her that day. The body they disconnected from all the tubes and wires in the NICU wasn’t my daughter. That baby was easily two or maybe three times the size of the tiny little girl I kissed good bye in Rexburg. She had been comatose since the Life Flight transport. The failure of her kidneys and other organs meant everything that went in stayed in, so she swelled like an overfilled water balloon from all intravenous fluids she received in the last 72 hours of her life. I remember very little about what happened in the weeks that followed her death. The only truly clear memory I have was at the viewing the night before the funeral service. I had been adamant that the casket was not to be opened for anyone, under any circumstances. Her face had been left badly bruised from the pressure caused by the oxygen tube that had been taped to her face and the swelling from the fluids. Brandon’s grandmother arrived before I did and insisted that she be allowed to see my baby. I don’t remember who told me the casket had been opened, but I remember people apologizing.

She would be eighteen years old on the 29th of March this year. I miss her every day. The hole in my heart is still very much there. I’ve tried to fix it and fill it with various things over the years, but nothing seems to stick. The edges of the hole have smoothed out over the years, but the hole is still visible though the lacquers of time and waxing of life. I keep cleaning and polishing—not to make it go away, more to accept and make peace with it. I still stub my toe and trip over the depression left from the loss of such a critical part of myself, but I’ve learned that I’m a lot stronger than I think. And on the days when I’m not, I know there’s an angel with her head on my shoulder breathing peace into my life and telling me everything will be ok.